Woman Gets 15 to Life for Killing Her Baby

SANTA ANA — Despite evidence that a Fullerton woman was suffering mental problems when she killed her newborn and put his body in her car trunk, a judge Monday said he was bound by state laws to sentence her to 15 years to life in prison.

The sentence means Jackie Lynn Anderson, 38, will spend at least 10 years in state prison before she is eligible for parole, a punishment that sharply disappointed her lawyer and family members who hoped she might receive probation and treatment.

Anderson’s trial involved an unusual defense that she was suffering from a rare pregnancy-related depression when she gave birth alone in a bathroom on Aug. 11, 1995, and then allowed the infant to die.

In January, the former credit analyst was convicted of second-degree murder in that death and of child endangerment for abandoning a newborn girl in 1992 after a similar unattended, at-home birth. She left the infant girl on a bed while she went to work. That child survived and was adopted.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Anthony J. Rackauckas Jr. said Anderson once may have been eligible for a more lenient sentence, but recent changes in state law required a prison term.

While expressing sympathy for the defendant, the judge said that sentencing her to probation would “reduce the gravity of the offense in a manner this court is not willing to do.”

He recommended that Anderson continue to receive treatment in prison, and said he believed that had she received probation and treatment after the 1992 delivery, “in all likelihood, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in.”

“We have a very difficult and tragic situation here,” he said.

Anderson wiped tears as the judge announced his decision, the minimum prison term possible for her crime, in a case that was followed closely by national groups involved in studying and supporting women accused of killing their newborns.

In written statements, Anderson said she wanted the judge to know she is not “evil,” just “depressed and screwed up,” an alcoholic who wanted only to be numb.

Since her incarceration after her newborn’s death, Anderson said, she has grown close to her mother and sister for the first time in her life. She has been forced to become sober, and has been receiving medication for her depression, which she said intensified during her four previous deliveries. All four of those children were adopted or placed with relatives.

She was prepared to be sterilized had she been granted probation, and is active in a support group for women suffering from postpartum depression, her lawyer said.

Prosecutors said she should spend time in prison, citing a “long pattern of indifference” for helpless newborns.

“The sentence here is not just about Jackie Anderson,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Daniel McNerney said during a hearing Friday in which the judge asked for more time to consider her punishment. “The sentence is also about a newborn baby boy who never got his chance to live, because his mother never let him have that chance. Under our law, that’s murder, and she should be sentenced as a murderer.”

Sentences involving the killings of newborns by their mothers have ranged from probation to lengthy prison terms across the country as debate over pregnancy-related depression continues among medical and legal experts.

Some have called for laws such as one in England that allows a “presumption of illness” for a mother who, when suffering from depression, harms or kills her infant in the first year of life. Such women face treatment rather than prison.

Jane I. Honikman, executive director of Postpartum Support International, called Anderson’s sentence discouraging but predictable given state laws.

“The law has to follow what society understands medically, and until the medical community comes out and makes a little more of a political statement, what can I say?” she said.

Anderson’s lawyer said she can understand why so many could be repulsed by such crimes, but urged greater understanding.

“It is incomprehensible to most people without a complete understanding of the biological and psychological aspects,” Deputy Public Defender Vicki Carter Briles said in court documents.

During a trial decided by the judge, Anderson’s defense relied heavily on the testimony of Margaret Spinelli, a New York psychiatrist who is studying neonaticide, the killing of an infant on the day of birth.

As in other cases of neonaticide, Anderson was paralyzed by a depression that causes expectant mothers to deny their pregnancies and then “dissociate” from their newborns, she testified.

Other psychiatrists were divided about Anderson’s mental state and the role pregnancy-related depression may have played.

After abandoning the baby girl in 1992, Anderson said, she was scared and expected a jail sentence, but she was never charged with a crime as prosecutors sent the case back to police for further investigation. By 1995, Anderson said, she was at the “apex of my alcoholism” and a “lost soul.”

After quitting her job and living in her car, she moved in with her mother, who ultimately confronted her with the pregnancy she was trying to deny. She said she remembers little from the delivery, except the feeling that her baby was dead after she heard him take a few raspy breaths. Medical reports indicate the child probably died within 10 minutes of birth because his airway was blocked.

The next day, she put the infant in a cardboard box in her car, and tried unsuccessfully to see her caseworker. Her mother later found the newborn’s body in Anderson’s trunk.